Blog Tour: My Husband’s Wife – Jane Corry

Welcome to the last stop on the My Husband’s Wife blog tour!

I kindly received an advance copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review – thank you to the author and Katy Loftus at Penguin

About the book:

Published: 25th August 2016 (already available as eBook)

It’s the perfect love story.

Lily meets Ed at a party, and on their second date, he proposes. She’s a lawyer, he’s an up-and-coming artist. They own a small but beautiful flat in London and mix with all the right people.

But Lily has a secret. Something from her past, that is soon to collide with her present. And she thinks her new husband is hiding something too…

The vows they made will soon be tested to the very limits.

‘Till death us do part…’

My review:

My Husband’s Wife opens with a prologue told in the first person of someone who has been seriously injured however there isn’t much information to go on. Then follows the announcement that Ed Macdonald has been found stabbed to death. We are then whisked back 15 years to 2000 when Lily and Ed have just returned from honeymoon and Lily is getting ready to return to work in a new role in Criminal Law. Lily is nervous about the prospect of going into a prison for the first time to meet her first criminal client, Joe Thomas. Ed works in advertising but his heart lies with being an artist – his ambition is to be an artist full time so his job is just a stop gap until he gets his big break.

In the next chapter we are introduced to Carla and her mother, Francesca, who live a few doors up from Lily and Ed. Carla is unhappy at school as she is ‘different’ due to her Italian heritage, meanwhile Francesca is either working to try and makes end meet or seeing her boyfriend Larry – who is actually married to someone else. Francesca knows this and on the surface is accepting of it but deep down is fed up with being the dirty secret.

My Husband’s Wife is told in alternately chapters from the perspective of Lily and Carla. Interwoven in between these chapters is snippets from the person in the prologue who is suffering from their injuries. The main part of the book is divided into two parts, the first part is 2000 to 2001 and the second part is from 2015. I didn’t particularly warm to either of the main characters; I found Lily very bitter and dismissive of Ed whereas Carla was manipulative, both as a child and an adult – however they are a product of their own backgrounds and it becomes evident why they have put up the emotional barriers. In a weird way, I did like the depth and darkness of Joe, his character was beautifully woven to demonstrate that you cannot always trust what you think of a person.

Aside from the story being divided into 2 parts, 15 years apart, time also passes by in big chunks at times during these time periods but it was well done so I never felt like I had lost track of what was happening. Unusually for a psychological thriller, this book spans 17 years and actually gs back further than that when Lily is recalling her childhood. As such, this is a long book at 520 pages. It is most definitely a slow burn but kept me hooked to find out what was happening and I liked how Joe kept popping up in the story.

An enjoyable thriller which keeps the readers attention from the very first page to find out who the injured person is who opened the book and who killed Ed and why.

About the author:

Jane Corry is a writer and journalist, and teaches creative writing all over the world. Recently she spent three years working as the writer-in-residence at a high-security prison for men.

In her own words: ‘I had always thought prisons were terrifying places for people who had done terrible things. But after my first marriage ended, I found myself working in one, and discovered a world I could not have imagined without actually being there. A world in which no one was quite who they seemed. A world that I found strangely addictive – so much so that it wormed its way into this book.’